Saturday, May 31, 2014

The Billy the Kid movie that set the standard(for errors and clichés). Fun, though.

There
was a 1911 short entitled Billy the Kid
with Edith Storey as Billy (don’t ask) and a bigger silent movie in 1925 with
Franklyn Farnum (no relation to William and Dustin) in the title role. But
really the first significant Billy film was the 1930 talkie MGM put out, produced
and directed by King Vidor.

Vidor,
you probably know, was to become very famous, especially with his War and Peace in 1956, but his career
was incredibly long: he made movies from Hurricane
in Galveston in 1913 (he had lived through the horrific 1900 storm there) until The Metaphor in 1980. Westernwise he is
best known for the 1946 potboiler Duel in the Sun. Billy the Kid was his first oater. He made the 1936 The Texas Rangers (the Fred MacMurray
one, rather good), the very weak Northwest Passage with Spencer Tracy in 1940 (don’t bother) and then the famous Cotton/Peck
Duel, usually known as Lust in the Dust. His last Western was Man Without a Starwith Kirk Douglas
(watchable but not great). This Billy
came in the early days of the talkie film and tried to be a serious effort, to
stand alongside Paramount’s The Virginian
of the year before, for example, or Fox’s The Big Trail. Vidor was a great believer in talking movies; he thought spoken
dialogue could give depth, subtlety and substance to the Western, a genre he suspected (poor
deluded fellow) of vapidity.

King Vidor overlooks 'Lincoln, NM'

The 1930
Billy the Kid is seminal: it
established many of the clichés and falsehoods that were to be perpetuated by
later versions and thus pass into ‘fact’. Said to be based on the 1925 Walter Noble
Burns book The Saga of Billy the Kid,
it is historical tosh from beginning to (especially the) end. But it’s fascinating nonetheless.

Not
because of the dialogue: the rather clumsy writing (Wanda Tuchock/Laurence
Stallings/Charles MacArthur), slightly wooden direction by Vidor and poor
acting by Mack Brown (he is clearly just saying the lines he has learned)
render the ‘talkie’ element of the film rather plodding and heavy-handed. Everything
stops when the characters talk to each other. There are even still title cards,
a hangover from silent movies, to slow the action down and render everything
more static.

Johnny
Mack Brown, billed as ‘John’, was 26, quite young in fact for a film Billy
(Farnum was 47, Kris Kristofferson 37) but looked older. He has a certain energy and charm
about him but his hair was very silly. And as I say he was (then at least) a
rotten actor. Johnny had been a football star taken up by Hollywood for baseball
movies and the like but muscular good looks could only take him so far. Clark Gable was
getting the romantic leads at MGM so Johnny tried a Western. Vidor actually wanted
Cagney and didn’t rate Mack Brown very highly but had to make the best of it.
By the mid-1930s Johnny was making cheap B-Westerns for Mascot, then even
cheaper Supreme ones and serials. He was immensely popular with juveniles,
though, and made a solid career of oaters. He was in 131 altogether, the last
being the Leo Gordon-penned Dan Duryea/Rod Cameron B, The Bounty Killer (1965) in which he had a modest part as the sheriff.

John Mack Brown, 26

All
Billy films really need an authoritative Pat Garrett, preferably a senior actor
with gravitas, and this one got Wallace Beery. Beery had joined the circus in
1902 and then made a career in music halls. He married Gloria Swanson in 1916
but it was a tempestuous and short-lived affair. He became a heavy in silent
movies for Paramount but he had a rich, deep voice and MGM hired him for
talkies in 1930. Beery was nominated for an Oscar for his part in The Big House in that year and he won
Best Actor for The Champ the year
after. He was one of the most famous ever Long John Silvers in ’34 and became
one of the great stars of Hollywood. He was in 21 Westerns: nine silents in the
20s, then his first talkie oater as Garrett in 1930, and of course he was a
great Pancho Villa in 1934. In Billy,
Beery’s Garrett has quite a secondary role and is not the ‘anti-Billy’ that
later versions wrote him up as. But he does it well.

Beery as Garrett (that's a wooden chain he's whittling)

There
had to be a girl, of course, and the writers invented Claire (played by Kay
Johnson, well known for posh dame roles), fiancée for the English rancher
figure (called Tunston). Said gal naturally falls for Billy and feels free to
say so when Tunston is conveniently shot. The girl figure is, however, clearly
a clumsy invention.

One of
the delights of the movie is that 'Angus' (rather than Alexander) McSween is played by Russell Simpson,
with a broad Scottish accent straight out of California. I do love Russell. He
was ideal as the bible-reading McSween and in fact became quite typecast as
preacher, elder or otherwise religious gent. His first role was uncredited in
the 1914 The Virginian but he was
promoted to Trampas in the 1923 remake. Billy
was Russell Simpson’s seventeenth Western (though first talkie). He specialized
in Wyatt Earp pictures: he was the judge in the 1932 Earp movie Law and Order, the editor in the 1934
effort Frontier Marshal and he had a
part in the Errol Flynn Dodge City in 1939 (he also appeared in later Flynn oaters Virginia City and The Santa Fe Trail). He was taken up by John Ford and was a great Pa Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, also appearing in Drums Along the Mohawk, My Darling Clementine, and Wagonmaster. Watch out for him. You’ll
spot that beaky nose.

Good old Russell, always good with a bible in hand

Other
spottable actors include Chris-Pin Martin as Santiago, the rather stereotypical
but sympathetic Mexican (for once not a barman).

There’s
a lot good about the film. The scenery, for one thing. Much of it was shot
around Gallup NM, and the ‘Lincoln’ looks really authentic (the real one is a great place to visit, by the way). The cinematographer
was Gordon Avil, who worked with Beery on The Champ. This was his first Western
and he went on to shoot 139 mostly TV oaters and the occasional movie, including
Fort Yuma and the 1958 Zorro (if you class that as a Western).
In Billy there are some impressive
longshot New Mexican landscapes and the scene where Billy holes up in a cave is
beautifully photographed.

Fine scenery

Then
some of the action scenes are quite well done. Of course it’s all nonsense. LG Murphy has
become 'Colonel Donovan' (James A Marcus), a corrupt sheriff/JP and the
out-and-out baddy (all Billy films follow this convention of Murphy as the bad
guy). Donovan’s chief henchman is the evil ‘Ballinger’ (Warner P Richmond) who
duly gets shot with his own shotgun outside the Lincoln court house. Noble ‘Tunston’
(I don’t know why they changed all these names) hires on young Billy Bonney, who
is a fast gun but a good boy really. Two endings were filmed: the DVD I have has
the American happy ending, where Pat lets Billy escape from Fort Sumner with
the lovely Claire. But there was a version for the European market where Billy’s
ending is more traditional.

Obligatory love interest

The
movie begins with a statement from the then Governor of New Mexico, a RC
Dillon, giving the opinion that “though it has taken liberties with the details
of his life” [boy, I’ll say] the film is true to the spirit of Billy the Kid’s fight
for justice. Yes, well.

Looks more like a Beery picture than a Billy one

Worth a watch, not only for Billyistas.

Lincoln, very good

Roy Rogers and Bob Steele would be Billy later in the decade but the next big Billy movie was the 1941 Billy the Kid, with Robert Taylor (aged 30) in the title part.More on Billy here.

Monday, May 19, 2014

Cormac McCarthy’s All
the Pretty Horses (Alfred A Knopf, New York, 1992) succeeded Blood Meridian,
after a gap of seven years. It is one of the great American novels.

It has similarities
with Blood Meridian in that it tells of the journey into Mexico and into
adulthood of a young man but it has a softer, almost a romantic wash on the McCarthyite bleakness and it has a more contemporary setting (1949). On one
level it is just a romantic tale of poor American boy meets rich Mexican girl
and it goes badly. At its blandest it could even have been made into a movie
with, oh, I don’t know, say Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz, someone like that.

But the romance is
just an overlay. You don’t have to scratch the picture’s glaze much to see the
despair and come face to face with human evil.

The cutesy title taken
from the sweet lullaby is on one level misleading but on closer inspection is
appropriate. In one version of the song, provided in Alan Lomax's book American Ballads and Folksongs, the
words go:

Way down yonder, In de medder

There's a po' lil lambie,

De bees an' de butterflies,

Peckin' out its eyes,

De po' lil lambie cried,
"Mammy!"

Another
version contains the lyrics

Buzzards and flies,

Picking out its eyes,

Pore little baby crying.

There is McCarthy’s poetic
eye for landscape, nature, weather and wildlife. The land the hero passes
through is a significant character in the dramatis personae and there is a deep
knowledge and understanding of horses. There is also stunningly authentic post-War
Texan dialogue (even though I was never there then, it rings totally true)
rendered in that idiosyncratic way with no inverted commas, with some
apostrophes omitted yet others retained (dont, cant, aren’t), with of
used as an auxiliary instead of have, with coinings of portmanteau words
(ticketstubs, grainpallets)and with no capitals for english
furniture. ‘Sentences’ with no finite verbs. Color, especially reds. Some
paragraphs, even single sentences, read as prose poems.

They heard somewhere in the tenantless night a bell
that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of
the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their
figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under
but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly
loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely
jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.

Why Cormac McCarthy
hasn’t been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature is a complete mystery.

The plot starts
bleakly enough as John Grady Cole, 16, his grandfather just dead, his parents
divorced and his ranch sold, and his pal Lacey Rawlins, 17, run away like the
teenagers they are and ride across the Rio Grande. But though “circumspect”
they are “jaunty”; they cannot help themselves. Freedom and the future flow
through their veins. They are joined by an even younger boy, a wild tearaway on
a possibly stolen horse, who calls himself by the name of a radio evangelist,
and they ride south.

There are no chapters
as such; it is a much more stream of consciousness affair. But the novel is broken
up into sections and there are clear ‘breaks’. The first hundred pages have a
positive, hopeful ring to them as the two friends (they have lost the younger
boy) get work on a ranch. But then the hacendado realizes the qualities
of John Grady and he is taken up, promoted and separated from Rawlins. You
sense the bad looming; it’s all going to go to hell. It does. A hundred pages
later the boys are free and a new section begins.

Despite the late
forties setting, the tale is very 'old West'. The very first page contains half a
dozen references which tell you where you are. The candleflame,
the hat and boots, a calf bawling, a train and some mesquite brakes all set the
context. Once in old Mexico it is even more the case. Horses, hats and Colt
pistols. A long ride through open country. Sticking with a partner. A lonely man
doing what a man’s gotta do. The scene where Cole repossesses his horses is
pure Western movie.

Cole is a complex
character. We are told on page 6 that he is “ardenthearted” and that turns out
to be true. He lies “a long time listening to the others breathing in their
sleep while he contemplated the wildness about him, the wildness within.” Yet
he is also bottled up, hard-boiled, amazingly so for a youth, laconic, tough as
nails. He suffers great loss and is cruelly mistreated and brings to both grim
fatalism. He has to kill to survive. Towards the end of the story we are told
that “He felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still.”

The loneliness is key.
The tale ends with the notion that Cole has no home, no roots, nowhere to be.
Mexico, Texas: it is no country for young men. He is Titus Alone. "...it was good that God kept the
truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no
heart to start at all." I mean, how bleak do you want it?

There is rather too
much Mexican history as the great aunt lectures Cole on the Maderos for a good
number of pages. We forgive.

The book is mordant,
resonant, haunting, hard and luminous.

All the Pretty
Horses was the first volume of The Border Trilogy, which
continues with The Crossing, and concludes with the third volume, Citiesof the Plain. When the books came out I eagerly snatched up The Crossing to read the further
adventures of John Grady Cole, who did not appear in it. But I entered a new
world of wonder and my persistence was anyway rewarded in volume 3.

Thursday, May 15, 2014

Crows don’t
always fly in a straight line or the most direct route from A to, well, B. They
sometimes circle round C, catching thermals, fly up to nests, D, with shiny things in their
beaks, get tangled in string, Z, and, if Ted Hughes is to be believed, even scorch their
mother’s ears to stumps. In the ninth episode of the Longmire saga, Craig Johnson's As the Crow Flies (Viking Penguin, 2012),
they do all of the above (except the last).

This
novel succeeds the 2011 Hell Is Empty,
the Dante one, with the e-short story Divorce
Horse in between. In both short story and new novel, preparations are still
ongoing for Cady’s wedding (it seems to take a lot of preparing) though she
finally gets to tie the knot (or anyway ride into a Cheyenne ceremony on Wahoo Sue)
at the end of the novel. Divorce Horse
is fun, by the way, and tells of an Indian rodeo, a stolen horse and a love affair, as well
as the inevitable wedding arrangements.

As The Crow Flies is a much more traditional whodunit than the
more ambitious Hell and we have a woman who falls to her death from a cliff
(the Painted Warrior site Walt and Henry are reccying - if there is such a word
- as a possible wedding venue). Walt helps with the investigation into what
they assume is a murder rather than a suicide or an accident.

Longmire is
not only out of his jurisdiction, as he was when he worked undercover in The Dark Horse, but not even in his own
state. He is up on the reservation in southern Montana and he becomes the
mentor (the Virgil?) of a new and colorful character, tribal Police Chief Lolo
Long. Maybe Walt is still on a semi-leave of absence recovering from his
hellish ordeal and thus free to wander, leaving Durant in the hands of Rita
& Co. Anyway he seems to have plenty of time to counsel the sexy Lolo and
solve the odd crime. Unusually, he is not shot or even beaten up this time,
though someone tries to kill him, twice.

Walt
even takes a trip of another kind when he takes part in an Indian peyote
ceremony and hallucinates. A county sheriff tripping on controlled substances. Daring, huh.

It’s a
good story even if you will probably guess who dunit pretty early on.

Cliff
Cly, FBI, is back, which is nice.

The best bit is probably the sleezy Jimtown Bar, as near to a proper Western saloon as you are going to get these days. In fact this is a real place. I found this article which described the original Jim and his successors, and the history of the world's largest pile of old beercans. See what Montana has to offer?

There
are a couple of serious points made, though. Mr. Johnson is evidently concerned
with the post-traumatic stress syndrome affecting war veterans. Two characters
suffer from it in this story, one being Lolo, who has been in Iraq, and her aggressiveness
and inability to relate even to her own son are clearly manifestations of that.
Walt is duly understanding and helpful. The fact remains that one wonders what
kind of policing system would allow a hyper-active, in-your-face-aggressive,
untrained person with clear psychological issues to hurtle about the place with
a huge .44 sidearm which she draws at the drop of a hat. Kinda worrying. She
calms down, though, under Walt’s tutelage, and will maybe become a good
officer. Maybe.

At one
point a Cheyenne character, Mrs. Small Song, sneers at Lolo and calls her a “red snake” for serving “in
the white man’s army.” Ms. Small Song ws not polite but did kind of have a point, I guess.

There’s
a sympathetic portrayal of Indian life and the problems of Indian society and reservation life. It is clear that Johnson is an
admirer of Native American culture and history, even if he doesn’t use that
term. I must say that Indians I have talked to do dislike the expression and
indeed it is rather absurd – as if those of other family origins born in the
USA are not ‘native Americans’. There are also some good cowboy and Indian
jokes, my favorite being the Indian lying on the trail with his ear to the
ground.

There’s
a nice twist on the good cop/bad cop act as Walt and Bear do a good cowboy/bad
Indian bit. I also liked Henry’s Red Birney Irregulars, a nod to Sherlock
Holmes. Come to think of it, Walt’s powers of observation may not be exactly
Sherlockian (or like those of the Mentalist) but he is pretty damn good at
noticing things.

Lola (as
opposed to Lolo) is back, Henry’s powder-blue T-bird, though Johnson insists on
referring to it as a “vintage” car. A vintage car, dear Mr. J., is one made
between 1919 and 1930. Lolo is in fact a “classic” car. Never mind. We can’t
all be sad-case old-car experts like Jeff.

Anyway
As The Crow Flies is another good read and was followed by a couple more short stories about
which, dear e-pards, I will waffle on another day.

Friday, May 9, 2014

In Act
1, scene 2 of The Tempest, Ariel says
that the king’s son, Ferdinand, cried as he leapt from the ship to make for the
island,

“Hell is empty

And all the devils are here.”

It is
perhaps a little surprising that Craig Johnson should use some Shakespeare for
his title rather than a quotation from Dante’s Inferno because Hell Is Empty, the seventh Walt Longmire
mystery, is his most ambitious work so far and is based on the first part of
the Divine Comedy (though in translation
rather than 14th century Italian). You almost get the idea that Mr. Johnson
deliberately invented the character of Virgil a few books back so that Walt
would have an appropriately named guide through the icy inferno. Maybe he did.

In a way
this is not a ‘Walt Longmire mystery’ at all; we know who dunit at the outset.
In that sense it is unusual. This volume is not so much mysterious as mystical.
And if, like me, you don’t care for mumbo-jumbo that much, you might not have
quite so much patience with it. We did put up with Walt hearing the voices of
long-dead Indians when he saved Henry before but it’s a bit overdone here.
There is a great deal of Indian lore and there are ghostly apparitions galore.

Still,
when it comes down to it, Walt sets off alone (the other Durant characters play
very little part in this one, though rich Omar helps out again) to track a
monstrous killer named Shade (geddit?) through the Bighorn Mountains in the
dead of winter. Of course he receives more than his fair share of buffetings,
one way and another, and nearly dies (again) but survives to tell the tale – in
the first person. And if the body count was high in previous volumes, boy
howdy, it’s stratospheric here. Northern Wyoming is littered with the corpses
of lawmen and bad guys (those devils who had vacated Hell). Durant morgue is
going to be working overtime. You thought Wyoming was the safest part of the
US, with the lowest murder rate? Think again. You’d be safer moving to Detroit
or New Orleans. They only have two or three hundred homicides a year there.

One of
Walt’s most likeable (and most Western) features is that he knows when a man’s
gotta do what a man’s gotta do. And does it. Often he does it in the teeth of
all advice. Maybe he does it from obstinacy but no, really he does it because
it’s right to do it. He won’t give up, ever. He pursues those devils through
the icy wastes. He makes the point that there is very little about Hell in the
Bible. Most of what we “know” about the place comes from Dante Alighieri. And
while Dante did have hellfire, the lowest reaches, reserved for the traitors,
were not hot but freezing. There were the betrayers, Virgil pointed out to the
Florentine poet, frozen in the gelid lake of Cocytus. Cain is there, immersed
up to his chin. Poor old Judas Iscariot is completely submerged under the ice.
Brrr.

Some
mystery, some whodunitism, is provided by the fact that Walt is warned about
traitors and can trust no one, not prison van drivers or FBI agents or even
dead Indians. Are they traitors? He doesn’t know. Nor do we.

There is
a pleasant leavening of humor. Walt continues to wisecrack his way through the
story, and Johnson amuses himself (and us) by writing lines such as “Jesus,
Virgil, Dante saved your life!” You see, Shade’s high-powered bullet hit the fat
paperback, “like a cliché from an old pulp western” (though it was usually a
watch there) and punched through the pages only up until the Canto XXXI
before giving up the unequal struggle.

Cady isn’t
married yet. Henry is still arranging the ceremony. But she’s going to have a
baby girl. Virgil tells Walt and Walt tells Cady.

He doesn’t
lose his hat this time. In fact he goes to some lengths to retain it.

These
books have evolved since The Cold Dish
and the character of Longmire is evolving with them; It will be interesting to
see how. Next in the sequence is an eBook short story, Divorce Horse, and the next novel is As The Crow Flies. Stay tuned to this blog to find out how it all
pans out…

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

It is hard to
watch The Birth of a Nation today. Such
overtly racist propaganda makes unpalatable viewing and even as a film it is
unconscionably long (twelve reels, 190 minutes at 16 fps) and the acting is to
modern eyes absurdly and childishly melodramatic. You watch it as a historical
document.

The film is, of
course, in many ways seminal. DW Griffith was a pioneer and he, more than any
other early film maker, practically invented the language of the cinema. In the
restored print available today the film is certainly remarkable in its staging
and fluidity. The battle scenes are extraordinary

Great battle panoramas

and the tableaux vivants showing such events as Lincoln signing the call-up,
the surrender at Appomattox or Ford’s Theater, modeled on famous paintings,
have an element of greatness about them. 1915 audiences witnessed the first intercutting
in a chase scene: two concurrent actions building to a joint climax. It was
remarkable and no wonder it thrilled. Cinema experts list many such
innovations.

DWG

But as Andrew
Sarris, quoted by Roger Ebert, says, "Classic or not, 'Birth of a Nation'
has long been one of the embarrassments of film scholarship. It can't be
ignored...and yet it was regarded as outrageously racist even at a time when
racism was hardly a household word."

1915 was the
fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Civil War/Great Rebellion. There were
many parades and commemorations held all over the United States, often with the
emphasis on reconciliation and forgiveness. There were few living survivors of
the conflict and those that attended were usually very old. The war was passing
into myth and legend. Many early films concerned themselves with the subject. Griffith
himself directed eleven one-reelers on the theme.

Hard to watch

Griffith was a
Southern sympathizer heart and soul. His father had been a Confederate colonel.
His actress wife had starred in productions of The Clansman (1906), a most unpleasantly anti-Negro play by white
supremacist author Thomas Dixon Jr. which represents the KKK as the savior of
the nation. It was a big hit and Griffith decided to adapt it for the screen.

Ebert again:

It is a stark history lesson to realize that this
film, for many years the most popular ever made, expressed widely-held and
generally acceptable white views. Miss [Lillian] Gish reveals more than she
realizes when she quotes Griffith's paternalistic reply to accusations that he
was anti-Negro: "To say that is like saying I am against children, as they
were our children, whom we loved and cared for all of our lives."

It smacks of
those slave-owners who used to deny their racism by arguing that “we treat our
niggers very well.”

We mustn’t
forget that there were those even at the time who protested against the film.
The NAACP was outraged and many people, black and white, wrote to the press or
expressed their dislike of the movie in other ways. The fact remains that the
film was a huge box-office success, and the première publicity stunt of
white-robed Klansmen parading in LA on February 8th, 1915 was
greeted with more amusement than outrage.

The majority
of the movie is given over to the story of two families, the Camerons and the
Stonemans, one Southern and one Northern, whose friendship is sorely tested
when they find themselves on opposite sides in the war. Sons of both families
die on the same battlefield. The stern Northern paterfamilias is the Hon.
Austin Stoneman, Leader of the House (hammed up unmercifully by Ralph Lewis),
based on Thaddeus Stevens, complete with black wig and club foot. His daughter
Elsie is played by Lillian Gish. I know it is correct to praise Ms. Gish for
her great acting and long career but to my mind, in this she is absolutely
awful.

Lillian Gish overdoes it shockingly

She demonstrates horror at the effrontery of a black man talking to her
by literally waving her arms in the air. You feel that even on the stage in the
corniest of Victorian melodramas she would be laughed at as overdoing it.

On the other
side, the Cameron family, Mae Marsh is more restrained (if overly sugary) as “Flora
Cameron – The Pet Sister” and she takes the (limited) acting honors. Marsh was
an interesting person who had appeared in several early silent Westerns,
including for Griffith, and became quite a star of the silver screen in the
1920s. Later, she was a character actor in talkies and was taken up by John Ford, appearing in many of his famous Westerns.

Mae Marsh better but still very sugary

Donald Crisp
was General Grant and other minor roles were taken by Monte Blue, Eric von
Stroheim, John Ford as a Klansman (well, according to Ford) and Raoul Walsh as John Wilkes Booth.

Raoul Walsh as John Wilkes Booth

One of the
most bizarre aspects of the film is the use of white actors in blackface.
George Siegmann is Stoneman’s henchman, Silas Lynch, “Mulatto Lieut. Governor”.
Stoneman’s evil, scheming “mulatto” housekeeper Lydia is Mary Alden, another who
hams it up with rolling eyes and villainous gestures. And Walter Long is Gus, “A
Renegade Negro”. He dares to pay court to Mae Marsh’s white character so the
girl duly throws herself off a cliff, as of course who wouldn’t?

Mary Alden as villainous 'mulatto' in blackface

Lillian Gish
said in explanation that "There were scarcely any Negro actors on the
Coast" and "Mr. Griffith was accustomed to working with actors he had
trained." Well, there was a reason why there were few black actors on the
coast, Ms. Gish, and probably a more evident reason still for Mr. Griffith not
using any. The blackface is so badly applied and unconvincing that we can only
conclude that Griffith wanted it that way. Using black actors in scenes
suggesting possible sexual intent with whites would have shocked 1915 audiences
in a way we would find hard to understand now.

There are even
scenes where lead actors in blackface are seen against a background of real
African-American people (in an uppity mob or as cheerful dancing “darkies”) and
this contrast is as bizarre as it is chilling. “Them colored folk” dance with
delight when the Confederates march off to war. I prefer to think their delight
that their masters were going to the battlefield was for other motives than
support.

President Wilson denied his approval of the play/film

The funniest part (unintentionally) is Gish’s scene caressing a very phallic bedpost.

There is a
scene of siege in a cabin which reminds one very much of Griffith’s The Battle of Elderbush Gulch of 1913,
also starring Gish and Marsh, except that the besiegers are not Indians but “coloreds”
and it is not the US Cavalry but the KKK that rides to the rescue at the last minute.

In this blog I tend not to talk about a film as being the 'property' of a director, in terms such as "DW Griffith's The Birth of a Nation"
as I do not hold with auteurism and believe that a movie is the product of too many other people to be accredited to only the director. However, in this case, as Griffith produced, released, directed, cast, and wrote it and it was his film company, I think we do need to call it "DW Griffith's The Birth of a Nation" and place any credit or blame firmly at his door.

Let’s finish
with Roger Ebert too:

The Birth of a Nation" is not a bad
film because it argues for evil. Like Riefenstahl’s “The Triumph of the Will,”
it is a great film that argues for evil.

It probably is a great film but as I said at the beginning, it's hard to watch now.